Andrew Fox - Over Our Heads

‘Birthdays is lucky,’ the barman says. ‘And I’ll split the winnings with you.’

‘See that you do,’ your father says.

‘I will. Sure, I said I will.’

‘And I said see that you do.’

Thank your father as he stands you drinks. Tell him: ‘I’ll get the next one.’

‘Get your hand out of your bleeding pocket,’ he snarls, foam spraying from his lip.

Stay too long with your father in the pub. Watch daylight stretch itself thin above the harbour beyond the window. Field a phone call from your mother. Fill her in on your progress.

‘If the doctors told him once —’ she says.

‘I know.’

‘I won’t wait on yous, so.’

Order whiskey after stout after stout after whiskey. Order toasted cheese sandwiches, peanuts and crisps. Feel the pub fill up around you, its heat and its conversation.

‘Why is a woman like a tornado?’ someone asks, and answers, ‘ ’Cause when she comes she screams blue murder and when she goes she takes the house.’

Go outside for a cigarette but tell your father you are trying to cut down. Listen to the regular clink of tacking against masts.

Sway.

Lean against the pub window ledge and look out over the harbour to the falling hills where a red sun dwindles to a flat line.

Shiver.

A girl is walking the beach, the wind in her hair and her jacket sailing. Watch her pick her way around puddles, over stones, up the slipway and out on to the road. Wallow in the sorrowful distance between you. Remember her with your every sense. Wave at her.

She is gone.

Take out your phone.

‘Is it you?’ Henno slurs when he answers. ‘We were starting to think you’d forgotten about us.’

Tell him, ‘Small hope.’

Find yourself in a smoking garden with Henno, Kellier and three nineteen-year-old girls.

‘We’re all going back to my gaff after,’ Henno says. ‘My Ma’s away. We’re having a session.’

‘Your Ma?’ one of the girls, a brunette, asks. ‘How old are you, like, thirty?’

‘I am not!’ Henno laughs. ‘I’m twenty-four years of age and not a day older. Ah no, it’s just … Sure, she has no one else to look after her.’ He leans over the girl’s shoulder and flashes you a wolfish smile.

Kellier rolls his eyes and elbows you in the ribs. ‘But would you not even do a half though, no? It’s your birthday like, your birthday . Still and all I bet you get good pills in the clubs over there, yeah? What are they like? Mad, yeah? I bet they’re mad.’

‘So, Henno was saying you live in England?’ the girl nearest you says. She has small features, wet eyes. She holds her glass with two hands and gazes up at you as though you might be in possession of some great secret.

Tell her, ‘London.’

Kellier’s eyebrows climb his forehead as he turns away. Henno mouths a filthy vowel of encouragement.

‘I’ve always wanted to live there.’

‘Well, why don’t you go, then?’

Stagger down the harbour road, the world tilting in your bleary vision. Steady yourself against a telephone pole outside the sailing club and vomit on the wheel of a Land Rover. Feel your phone vibrate. Read Henno’s name. Turn your phone off.

Let the sea wall lead you home through a wind that pulls at the corners of your eyes. Look out towards the islands, their flat shapes black against darkness. Watch the beacon of the lighthouse flicker on and off.

Make your way back through the lane, back along your silent street. Wrestle with your key in the lock and kick off your shoes in the kitchen. Creep up the stairs. Crawl into bed fully dressed. Listen through the wall to your father’s troubled breathing as your ceiling starts to spin.

Fall asleep in the room where once you sheltered countless childish wishes. Sleep longer than you have in weeks. Sleep better than you have in months. Dream of long-forgotten futures that will come to haunt your waking hours.

Your mother is screaming.

Open your eyes.

When we dropped below the cloud, Dani’s hand fell on my wrist. I leaned across her and looked out the window at a slab of iron sea, corrugated with waves and scratched with the small white V’s of dissipating ship wakes.

‘Did you know,’ she said, ‘that the Gaelic peoples descend from the Scythian Goídel Glas and an Egyptian Pharaoh’s daughter?’

‘Is that a fact?’ I said.

‘And did you know that an Irish monk, St Brendan, discovered America centuries before Columbus?’

‘The Navigator,’ I said. ‘Yes. That one, I knew.’

The wing dipped. Squares of green land gleamed and vanished northward into haze. I felt my breath catch. Dani squeezed my thumb and smiled.

‘Are you okay?’ she said.

When Dani was born, I’d made noises to Elaine, with all the well-meaning arrogance available to the immigrant father, that we must do everything we could to provide our daughter with a transatlantic childhood: Fourth of July fireworks and the Paddy’s Day parade, a month each summer at camp in the Adirondacks and two weeks in the Gaeltacht. But after Mam died, and I’d sold the house in Coolock, it was easy to put things off, to make excuses. Easy too to stay away from the Queensboro Irish Center, where a circle of blotchy-armed women, name of Colleen or Shannon or Erin, compared genealogies over mugs of milky tea. But one evening as we crossed the bridge on our way home from late study hall, Dani announced:

‘I think, Daddy, I’d like to be a better Irishwoman.’

I let the ‘woman’ slide, though she was just shy of her fifteenth birthday, and downloaded The Táin to her iPad as soon as we got home. Before long, she was dragging me on school nights to uillean pipe recitals up in Yonkers and through the rain on Sunday mornings to Seán O’Casey matinees at the Irish Rep. Friday nights, while her classmates went in pairs to movies, she borrowed her mother’s credentials and went alone to lectures on Roger Casement or Ernie O’Malley at Ireland House on Washington Square. And finally, one night as we waited for pizza, she brought out a binder stuffed with admissions information from Ireland’s various universities, which she must have been assembling for months, and made her pitch.

‘But I have tenure,’ Elaine pleaded. ‘I have full tuition remission for you here.’ Her lips were weak, her eyes very far away beneath their milk-bottle lenses.

‘It’s what I want,’ Dani said, and she looked at me. ‘Please, Daddy.’

While Elaine sulked, we hashed out a plan over double pepperoni and garlic knots. I’d cash in all the personal days I’d been hoarding for the past two years, have Georgette hold my caseload over for a week that summer, and Dani and I would jet off for my first trip back in fourteen years, her first trip ever, with a view to checking out some schools in Dublin and one in Galway, plus discover the heritage, plus spend some quality time together — just the two of us. My father had died when I was in my teens, and I hadn’t heard from his side of the family in years. On my mother’s side there were some cousins scattered through Cabra and Kimmage, but I could no longer picture their faces, never mind figure out how to get in touch with them, even if I’d wanted to.

We checked into a featureless hotel for nomadic men of business by the Grand Canal, in which Georgette and AmEx miles had secured for us a junior suite. There was a couch, a phone, an enormous TV, and two bedrooms separated by a locking door.

‘The name Dublin,’ Dani read from her iPad, ‘appears in the record as early as the writings of Ptolemy the First, around 140 AD. It derives from the Irish Dubh Linn, meaning Black Pool, which is to say, the area of dark water where the Rivers Poddle and Liffey meet. The city’s been a Viking garrison, a Norman stronghold, and was briefly the second city of the British Empire.’